The Knife
by electric caterpillar
Summary: Hirano likes Alice very much. rated m for a reason, strong and unpleasant content throughout


_I want you to know_  
_when I look in your eyes_  
_with every blow_  
_comes another lie._

_You think it's all right_  
_You think it's all right_  
_You think it's all right_  
_You think it's all right_

_Can't you feel the knife?_

* * *

Hung in Kohta's arms as pliant as a little doll Alice slept the deep, dead sleep of overtaxed children, and Kohta thought looking at her in her disheveled ruffles and dense curls and strawberry-pink cheeks and lips pursed in surprise at some infant fantasy she was the sweetest creature, the loveliest little thing he had ever seen.

Smiling a timid, tender smile, he arranged her loping little head against his shoulder, tucked the ruddy curls of her hair behind the peach-pink shells of her ears and kissed her, her temple, the speckled apple of her cheek, the corner of the baby rosebud of her mouth. In her sleep she moistened her mouth with a slip of bright tongue, clasped and unclasped her tiny porcelain-white palm on the surface of Kohta's bicep.

Looking at that, he nursed a tenderness foreign not in its intensity, with which he was well acquainted, but its slowness and subtlety, its lamb-like gentleness, its shocking kindness. He loved that little child with a noble doe of love.

Kohta holding the drowsing child tight in the cocoon of his affections on the floor of the rocking humvee amidst the noise of riot and despair became suddenly aware of his position, suddenly very red. He spared a blushing look around - his comrades distracted in their own inner conflicts had not seen his kisses, the palsy of his tenderness.

"Dad," Alice said in her sleep, a sound as small and miserable as to put out Kohta's heart like a licked finger snuffing a candle flame, and she put out her little hand, and Kohta caught it, and held it to his cheek, and murmured soothingly to her, and she cuddled in to his breast and quieted.

He hugged her like he had hugged his stuffed animals when he was a child himself.

She smelled beautifully of the flower smells of her shampoo, something eerily adult and womanly, like roses, Kohta thought, tucking his nose into the astonishing bunny rabbit softness of her curls.

The vehicle hit a pot or a pile of bodies and jolted their bones together violently; he squeezed her tight, protected her, he thought with a tickle of hot pleasure, and then readjusted her in his arms, hauling her up, and the plump pliant end of her thigh in the palm of his hand made him think of the round plastic butt of a pistol.

She woke.

"Dad?" she asked, gently perplexed, squinting through sleep and touching his chin.

"It's okay," Kohta told her, for lack of anything better to say, and she began to cry.

What a sorry, hard, horrible sound, like a violin being struck against a wall! Kohta's comrades mostly averted their eyes from the scene of livid misery, deeply uncomfortable. The motherly nurse reached out from the driver's seat to take Alice's hands consolingly, but Alice rebuffed her, holding onto Kohta's neck like a stone standing out of a current which accosted her, and that made Kohta feel very, very warm. Alice's buttock sat exactly across the lump of his groin.

"It's okay," he crooned stupidly, and began to bump Alice on his hip in an approximation of a woman rocking a woeful infant. The effect was gradual but profound.

"I want my dad," Alice confessed to him in a damp whisper, tucked closely into his chest and throat like a little animal cowering in the cover of his flesh from the elements, cuddled into him until he wore her like a scarf. Kohta could not stop stroking her hair, wondering at the texture, as soft as anything he'd ever felt, soft as baby daisies and the ideas of dandelions, soft as daydreams.

"I know," he said. He felt the flutter of her eyelashes beneath his jaw.

For some reason, Kohta was suddenly struck dumb by the fact that Alice was in fact a neophyte in femaleness that would - that might - one day be a woman. He felt the wheels of the humvee crush over pebbles of the ruin they drove over and the tiny determined hum of Alice's heart inside her breast pressed flush against his cheek.

He grasped her yielding minuscule hip very tightly.

"Where are we going?" she said into his ear, and her confidence in him nourished him like honey and barley, her voice so small and sweet, like a fairy bell.

"Somewhere safe."

Kohta kind of lied. Alice may have known. She pulled her fine little fingers gingerly through his hair.

"Where?"

"Don't worry about it."

She was very worried about it. Kohta felt her frown impressed on his chin. It hurt him.

"Row, row, row your boat ..." he began, gently, jostling, but Alice was somber as a little monk, looking through him as if she witnessed something astonishing. She looked suddenly very old.

"It's okay," he reassured her, again, a little desperately, and he lied, lied, lied.


End file.
